Stop Spinning and Focus on What You Can Control
Every time that we face a challenge in our lives (personal, family, professional), we have two choices:
✅ To feel overwhelmed and paralyzed or
✅To feel that there is always an opportunity to overcome the challenge
When this challenge involves VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) it becomes more extreme. It is easy to get frustrated when things aren’t going your way.
I’ll use a recent example from my life. My husband and I are in the midst of an international move and our final container shipment has been rescheduled multiple times. I felt myself getting angry about the situation. I’ve been in limbo now for months. When they called me about a seventh schedule change, I felt like everything was spinning and I wanted to scream at anyone who would listen. I’m sure many of you would feel the same way.
I am in the middle of what we call a VUCA storm. I cannot control my circumstances. I can’t control when a ship will come into the port of Houston, if they will have an available container going to Brazil when I need it, etc. To do all the things I need to do to put our home on the market, I need to have our things out of the house. Although I couldn’t control the shipping situation, I could control my reactions and focus on actions that I could take. For example, I could identify communication issues between companies and get the right people to talk to each other.
In an earlier blog post, we talked about how we don’t control the VUCA world, but we have COMPLETE control over our thoughts, perceptions, and feelings about it. So, in my situation, I could control my mindset and behaviors. My situation was a perfect time to apply some key lessons we wrote about in our book, Mindset Wizardry – the Magic Behind Thriving in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) World. Are you wondering about how to control your mindsets and behaviors? Here are some tips from the book:
✅You control your thoughts. It is easy to get into a negative place when facing extreme change or adversity. You might feel sorry for yourself, you might think that nothing will ever work to fix the situation. When you find yourself in this place, reframe your thoughts into actions that you CAN take. What is something specific that you can do right now? Another technique is to distract yourself with a thought that makes you feel good --- something you are grateful for or think about something funny your kid or pet did recently. When you are in a more positive frame of mind, you will feel better and will be able to think more clearly. In my situation, I took a break, vented to a friend, and had a laugh. The little break helped me think more clearly about possibilities and put me in a better frame of mind to work with people and solve problems.
✅You control your response. Under stress, most people react but they don’t necessarily do this in a productive or intelligent way…it is more likely an automatic reaction, perhaps snapping at someone or another inappropriate emotional reaction. Instead, take a moment to breathe and think about how you react. You can choose your reaction. You can choose what to say and not say. In my case, I wanted to yell at everyone but instead, I provided an objective view of the situation and engaged all the parties so we could try a more creative approach.
✅You control your choices. This is along the same lines. You need to understand that you can choose how you perceive things and how you behave --- you choose your thoughts, and you choose how you act.
✅You control your ability to create change. You don’t need to be a victim of change and just let it happen to you. You can and should be proactive. This is a lot easier when you focus your energy on the things you can control and influence. The key lesson is not to waste your time with the things that concern you that you cannot control or influence --- you can’t do anything productive there and you will just get frustrated.
The approach worked, I was able to get the right people engaged in finding solutions and by working the steps in a different order, we were able to find a container on a different ship that could meet our desired timeline. I am happy to report that our shipping container was delivered to our house yesterday and it is now loaded and ready to ship to our new home in Brazil.